Snark

No, that's not how radiators work. Not in real life, and not in KSP. That's not why they're in the game. A radiator is not a magical device for eliminating heat. It's a device for increasing heat flow. Heat flows from hot things to cold things. Radiators make this happen faster. When you have a ship in the vacuum of space... vacuum's a good insulator. So, hot ship, needs to dump heat, radiators help to transfer that heat rapidly to the frigid depths of infinite space. Shrieking through atmosphere in a burning cloud of plasma? Nope, not gonna happen. The plasma around the ship is hotter than the ship. The ship is getting hot not because it's making internal heat, but because it's being heated from the outside. So, a radiator is not going to move heat from the (relatively) cold ship to the (hotter) surrounding plasma. That would be making heat flow "uphill", from a colder object to a hotter one, which radiators don't do. A radiator can only cool the ship if the radiator can "see" something colder to radiate to. Radiator that's completely surrounded by incandescent plasma = nowhere to radiate the heat to. What you want during reentry is the exact opposite of a radiator. A radiator makes heat moves from hot things to cold things faster. Since your ship is a cold thing, and it's surrounded by a hot thing... you want to make the heat transfer slower, not faster. You want an insulator. And that's what heat shields are for. (Not only do they insulate, but the ones with ablator actually carry heat away by vaporizing.) That's why nobody puts radiators on real-life spacecraft to deal with reentry heat. In KSP, radiators were never intended as an aid for reentry; they're for dealing with other stuff, such as solar heating, or heat-generating equipment on the spacecraft. As for "how to make spaceplane components survive reentry"-- that's a matter of spacecraft design, and piloting. Radiators were never meant to solve your problem, and won't. And for spaceplanes, the heat shields aren't a design option. So, if you're having trouble reentering a spaceplane without going kaboom, the issue is going to be some combination of how your ship is designed, with how you're flying it. Certainly there are plenty of folks here who'd be happy to offer advice (either on design or piloting), but they'll need more information to work from. The best thing you could do is to post a screenshot of your ship, along with some numbers (what's the mass during reentry? how fast is it going when it hits atmosphere? how steep a descent?) The good news is this: even though radiators can't help you... they don't need to. Plenty of folks around here are flying big spaceplanes all the time, and manage to do reentry. So it's just a matter of how you design and fly it. Once you learn the tricks of the trade, you'll be good to go.

Basically, no. Bear in mind that the cubic octagonal strut (and other parts of its ilk) aren't "dragless". They're physicsless. There's a difference. Once upon a time, in the early days of KSP, the so-called physicsless parts really did have zero mass and zero drag. You could spam them and it would make not one whit of difference to the vessel's performance. Those days, however, are long gone. Now, they do have mass and drag. However, it works differently from "regular" parts. The way it works is, all the mass and drag for the "physicsless" part get added to the part's parent-- or, if the parent is itself physicsless, to the closest "ancestor" part that's not physicsless. So, imagine that you have a part with a flat upper surface that's, say, 0.625m across, and you're thinking about putting the small nosecone on it, or alternatively, some physicsless part such as the cubic octagonal strut. Here's how the game would see those two options: The nose-cone option: Nice and low-drag. The flat upper surface of the parent part won't hurt you, because it's not exposed (the nosecone sits on top of it). The nosecone is nice and pointy. Everybody wins. The physicsless-part option: Draggy. The game sees the physicsless part, so adds its mass and drag to the part you've attached it to. The part you've attached it to therefore still has that flat forward-facing surface (because the physicsless part doesn't count for occlusion purposes), and then you add some extra mass and drag because of the presence of the physicsless part. In other words: Physicsless parts can never help you, in terms of drag. All they ever do is add drag. So no, your suggestion's not going to gain you anything in terms of drag-- quite the opposite.

So, when you say "isn't frozen" in the same sentence as "stuck on the loading screen"... can you be a little more specific what you mean by that? My guess is: it really is pretty much frozen, but you continue to see the witty loading tips cycling through various messages. Is that the case? If that's the case, then this is common behavior when something is causing errors during the loading process. If you look inside your KSP directory, you'll see a log file. Try opening that in a text editor, and scroll to the end of the file-- do you see any errors listed there? If so, what are they? Have you tried running with just one mod installed and then the other, and see whether the problem persists? That would help narrow down the problem: for example, is it caused by RemoteTech, or by JX2Antenna, or by some interaction between the two.

Moving to Gameplay Questions. A while back, I put together this illustrated docking tutorial, which you may find useful.

@Leafbaron, are you running any mods, or is this pure stock?

Great, glad it's worked out for you! (And thanks for the analysis & explanation... if anyone runs into this problem in the future, I now have one more "well, did you check ___?" thing to ask them.)

Excellent, glad it worked out for you! ...Which brings us to your final "How-to-use-the-forum for newcomers" lesson for the day: if you post a question, and it's been answered (either by yourself or by someone else), you can mark the question as "answered" so that everyone knows this (and can see it in the list view). To do this: Pick the response that you feel best answers your question (in this case, it would presumably be your post that I've quoted, above), and click the gray "check-mark" button that appears at the left-hand side. That will not only mark the question as "answered", but it will also move that post up to the top of the responses list, so that anyone who comes along later will immediately see the answer without having to wade through the whole thread. Anyway, welcome to the forums, and happy flying!

Not sure what's going on, there. The OPM patch already does the following: @PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter]]:AFTER[OPM] It has always been my understanding that the "AFTER" directive in ModuleManager also implies "NEEDS"-- that is, by saying "AFTER[OPM]", that means "doesn't apply if OPM isn't present". That's always how I have authored patches in MM, and it has always seemed to work for me. Certainly in my own test environment here, I'm running JX2Antenna, with the OPM patch present, and without OPM actually installed... and everything looks just fine. I see Communotron-16 as 500k, RA-100 as 100G, and so forth. If I then try deleting the ":AFTER[OPM]", then it shows me all the antennas having 1/4 their usual power. So everything I observe is consistent with "AFTER[OPM] means it won't apply if OPM isn't installed." So, I'm not sure why the results you observe are the precise opposite of what I'm observing. Something weird is going on here. It may be that my understanding of the semantics of AFTER is incorrect, or perhaps it has an inconsistency bug that causes it to work or not-work based on some other side effects of other stuff. Just to verify: Are you saying that (in contrast to what I observe), the following three things are true? the default-installed OPM patch that comes with JX2Antenna causes all the stock antennas to have 1/4 the power deleting that patch fixes the problem (i.e. verifying that your 1/4 power observation isn't caused by something else) leaving the patch in place and adding ":NEEDS[OPM]" also fixes the problem (i.e. verifying that NEEDS is actually not redundant, if AFTER is specified) If you have observed those three things, then that would seem to indicate that I do indeed need to add "NEEDS[OPM]" ... though, why the dickens I'm not observing the problem in my own game, I have no clue.

Yup. Fortunately, that's pretty easy to do. Go to imgur.com (you don't need an account or anything). Click the "new post" button. Drag your screenshot file onto the "drag images here" box that they give you. It'll then show you your image on a page. Right-click on the image, choose "copy image location" to get the URL of the image file Paste that URL into your forum post here. The forum will automagically convert it into an in-line image in your post. When you mouse-over the quote in your post (either when you're first writing it, or if you come back to edit it later), a little box will appear at top left of the quote (it's a little square button with a four-directional arrow on it). Click on that, then hit delete. Done. Also, if you ever need a moderator's help with something (e.g. "help, I accidentally posted something and need to delete my post", or whatever), the best way to do this is to just report your own post. (Click the "report post" link, right above the text of your post.) When you do that, it'll pop up a little dialog where you can type a message, i.e. "sorry, I accidentally posted, can you delete?" or whatever. When you report the post, that will automatically signal the moderator team, so whoever happens to be available can come and take care of it.

Lots of possible things going on here, but it's hard to say without knowing what your ship looks like. Could you post a screenshot?

Hello, and welcome to KSP! Those are all great suggestions-- as you might expect, you're not the first person to want some of those things. "There's a mod for that" is not really the answer to posts in this forum (since suggestions here are requests for the stock game) ... but while you're waiting/hoping for Squad to add the features to the stock game, you can get those features now via mods, if you're so inclined. This is the mod for you (four new planets, eleven new moons, and yes, one of the planets has rings): Have fun!

Thanks for calling it out! Nice to see it's appreciated. That said, though.... @Kottabos, if you're reading this, perhaps you could make sure to give @steedcrugeon credit, here? The video simply mentions that the antenna is "by Snark"... whereas I'm just the "publisher" and the config author. steedcrugeon did the model & animation, and that was the large majority of the actual elbow grease that went into the mod. (I think this is especially relevant because Kottabos spends quite a bit of time raving about how frickin' gorgeous this antenna is-- the design, the animation. I happen to agree with him there ...but that gorgeousness is 100% due to steedcrugeon, who's the origin of both the model and the visual design.) [EDIT] Okay, I finally figured out how to make the YouTube comment thingy work, left a note there. These newfangled contraptions...

Definitely +1 for the smaller landing legs and no ladders. Extra parts add drag; the tiny landing legs are plenty; and ladders really aren't needed on the Mun, ever, given how easy it is for kerbals to fly around with EVA thrusters in munar gravity. I'm a fan of using fuel ducts for my first manned Mun landing. Usually I'll send a single unmanned lander first, because compared with the science you get from Kerbin, even a single set of science results from the Mun can be a huge boost to early career. Easily enough to get the fuel ducts. Nice choice of Mk1 pod + 2-ton LFO + Terrier for your lander stage-- that's an excellent combo in KSP, I use it all the time, for practically everything. Available at low tech, cheap, light, has scads of dV. Here's an example munar lander from early career that I used recently-- note the fuel ducts. This lands and returns fairly handily, with a reasonable amount of dV safety margin. Like your design, my top stage is Mk1 + 2-ton LFO + Terrier (though I've got a Science Jr in there). Also like yours, the stage below that has 4 tons LFO (though I do it with one Swivel rather than two Terriers). After that is where it gets different-- you have 24 tons of LFO, I've got 8 tons LFO in asparagus drop-tanks, backed up by ~30 tons of SRBs. I'm not holding this up as any particular sort of "ideal" design-- there are a lot of ways to put together a low-tech Mun mission. This just happens to be one that works reasonably well. The SRBs give it a nice, solid, high-TWR boost off the pad. By the time they burn out, it's already tipped over past 45 degrees and doesn't need much TWR, so the Swivel plus two Terriers provide sufficient TWR, and it doesn't need to spend much mass on engines. (The SRBs burn out above 10km, so the Terriers do just fine-- they're practically in vacuum by that point.)

Just to add to the chorus... if you'd like something much lighter-weight than KER (and without a potentially bewildering array of UI options), you may also find BetterBurnTime helpful: ...it's got basically no UI, but one of the things it does for you is this: when you're on a collision course with the ground on a vacuum world, it displays a "seconds until impact" display next to the navball (in the same place that the navball usually displays "time until maneuver node"), and also a burn-time-to-come-to-a-halt-at-ground-level (in the same place that the navball usually displays "estimated burn time" for a maneuver node). Simple and intuitive. So all you need to do for a suicide burn is to set your SAS to "hold surface retrograde", wait until the time-until-impact is around 60-70% of the estimated burn time, then burn.

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

In other words... you actually flew a research vessel and USED A SCIENCE INSTRUMENT to actually GATHER SCIENCE! You're livin' the dream, man!

Yeah, I was really happy I was able to persuade @steedcrugeon to model a big antenna (not that I exactly had to twist his arm... he really liked the idea of making one, and immediately came up with the inspiration of modeling it after the JAXA LDA). Before that, I was having to make do with using a rescaleFactor'ed Reflectron GX-128 from RemoteTech, with some ModuleManager hackery to get it to work with stock CommNet instead of the RemoteTech communications implementation. It worked, kind of... but it's not really designed for use with stock CommNet, and in any case, anything I did with it was unshareable, since the RemoteTech license doesn't allow redistribution of the models. I like steedcrugeon's design idea way better.

Well, wasn't planning on it. Part of what this antenna is going for is an interesting gameplay tradeoff: huge transmission power on the one hand, but the price you pay for that (other than actual, literal price) is that it's big, bulky, awkward. Bear in mind that this puppy's several times more powerful than a fully-upgraded DSN on Kerbin... not exactly designed for trundling around on a rover, particularly while extended. So it's supposed to be somewhat physically awkward, for game-balance reasons. This is an antenna for motherships and large bases. That said, you can always get creative with designs. Bear in mind that it's a relay antenna, so it doesn't actually have to be on the rover. You can leave the big antenna parked in orbit, and put something smaller on a rover that goes down to the surface. If you need better coverage than the one relay, you can make a local constellation of smaller satellites with little relay antennas. If you don't need the antenna to be turned on while you're actually driving around, you could probably rig up something with some landing legs-- i.e. a rover that can park, extend some legs to tip up one end, and open the antenna that way. Or use big landing legs like the ones in SpaceY, and you could hoist the whole rover pretty high off the ground. (Or, for that matter, don't use landing legs at all, if you don't mind voiding the warranty. Just open the antenna as-is, so that when it opens, it jacks the rover off the ground. Doable, though I confess I have trouble making myself do that... just makes me cringe. What a way to treat delicate, expensive equipment...) The two "trunks" on the sides of the container are surface-attachable. So it's possible (if somewhat physically awkward) to make a rover that has the big antenna mounted vertically in the middle, pointing at the sky. Or perhaps have it parallel to the ground, but mount the wheels on some I-beams or something that are canted downwards to give the antenna some ground clearance.

Ah, okay, makes sense.

Well, sure! But not an option for those of us who don't (and never will) use MechJeb. Not that there's anything wrong with using MechJeb, for folks who enjoy it. It simply happens not to be my personal cup of tea, for a variety of reasons, chief of which is that it would completely kill the parts of the game that are personally enjoyable for me. Making MechJeb palatable to me would require rewriting it so that it has no UI and provides no autopilot features... but that would kinda defeat the purpose of it. So, I wrote this to be a simple, compact, lightweight, nearly-UI-less mod that will do exactly what I want it to do for my personal gameplay. It does what I need it to do, and nothing else. (As with all my mods: I just mod for my personal enjoyment, so that the game will do what I want it to do. Folks who like the same things that I happen to like, will get good use out of it. Those who prefer MechJeb or other solutions-- well, more power to you!)

Lots of ways to slice this. Again, it just comes down to what one's goal is. For example, I'm pretty practical, and for most of what I do, 60-70% coverage of my area of interest is plenty. So, let's say I'm pioneering my way to a planet, and I've just got ONE relay satellite for my surface operations to talk to. So, I just decide which hemisphere I'm primarily going to be operating in, north or south. Then I put my relay in an extremely elliptical orbit, with a very high Ap over that pole, and a fairly low Pe over the opposite pole. And voilà, I've got my good-enough coverage. The relay spends most of its time loitering for days on end, high over the pole where it has an excellent view of the entire hemisphere, as well as all 360 degrees of the ecliptic. There will be brief outages once every many days, as it whips past the opposite pole, but that's not a problem; I just pause surface operations until the short outage is past.

Hi everyone, I've released v1.0.1 of AntennaSleep. No new functionality. This just fixes a bug that causes NullReferenceException to get spammed if a ModuleDeployableSleep (from this mod) ever gets added to a part that doesn't have a ModuleDeployablePart on it. That doesn't affect you if you just install this mod... it mainly addresses the potential for hilarity in case some other mod adds a compatibility patch that tinkers with with things. (Discovered the problem when I was writing the RemoteTech compatibility patch for JX2Antenna, which is a new mod by @steedcrugeon and me-- it adds a big 1000G antenna for large modded solar systems.) So, unless you're getting a bunch of NullReferenceExceptions (which you probably aren't), you can view this as an "optional" update.

Just to be clear, this is not what suborbital means. You can be in a circular orbit and not stay there long enough to go around once, but it doesn't count as suborbital. @bewing's explanation above is correct-- @Loren Pechtel, follow his advice. Just to be completely specific and accurate, here's exactly what the definition of suborbital is: If you're in the SoI of a world with an atmosphere, Pe is lower than the atmosphere height (70 km, on Kerbin). If you're in the SoI of a vacuum world, Pe is lower than zero. You're traveling at less than escape velocity. (For example, if you're in Kerbin's SoI and going 4000 m/s, it doesn't count as "suborbital" no matter how low your Pe is, or even if you're on a direct collision course with the planet. Going straight down at the ground at 4000 m/s isn't "suborbital". Or, indeed, wise... but very Kerbal.)

Good to know. However, it's worth noting that the above conversation is from nearly a year ago, so I think it's pretty safe to say that the OP has long since had their problem solved-- not to mention that there have been a couple of KSP versions since then, and at least one of the problems with the OP's ship (fuel drainage issues) would be moot today anyway, due to the changed fuel-flow mechanics of KSP 1.2. Locking the thread to prevent further confusion. If someone else has a similar problem and wants to ask about it, feel free to open an new thread.

Certainly would be interested to hear the OP's perspective on this... but it's worth noting that the point of, well, pretty much anything in KSP is "just for fun". Or, perhaps, "because it's a challenge", which is just another variant of "for fun".